Thomas Hyde

November 17, 2016

This month, we are pleased to announce that Thomas Hyde has joined the New Oboe Collection curated in partnership with Composers Edition (click here to view). Thomas’ music for Cor Anglais & Piano has recently been featured as part of the 2016 Presteigne Festival and Autumn Tour..

This piece for cor anglais and piano was a commission from Music & Past and Present and was inspired by images and colours of winter, both dark and light. It is based on a short song I wrote called ‘Living Presences’ which set a poem by Kathleen Raine describing the angels (this seemed an appropriate choice since I was composing this work during Advent). The music begins quietly and static and then builds in energy. At the end, a transcription of the original song appears as the work’s coda when the music resolves into D flat major. In essence, it is one extended melodic line. Winter Music is dedicated to Janet Snowman, a colleague at the Royal Academy of Music, and I later made an arrangement for cello and piano.

About Thomas Hyde

Thomas Hyde was born in London in 1978 and educated there and at Oxford where he read music. He studied composition privately with David Matthews while at school and later as a postgraduate with Simon Bainbridge at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Having gained the M.Mus degree with distinction, he was appointed the Academy’s Manson Junior Fellow in Composition for 2001/2. He attended Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Hoy Summer School in 1996, and worked with Sir Harrison Birtwistle at Dartington in 2000. He returned to Oxford in 2003 to study with Robert Saxton and was awarded a doctorate in composition. In October 2008 he was appointed Lecturer in Music at Worcester College, Oxford and was visiting lecturer in composition at City University, London from 2009 until 2013. He has also held posts at Lady Margaret Hall and Brasenose College, Oxford. He is currently on the music staff at King’s College, London.

Thomas Hyde’s work first came to wide attention when he was the youngest finalist in English National Opera’s young composer festival ‘New Visions, New Voices’ in 1992. Among the prizes and awards he has received are the National School Band Association Prize (1993) and a Wingate Scholarship (2004-5). His music is performed regularly in Britain, at festivals including Spitalfields, City of London, Presteigne, Deal and Little Missenden, as well as abroad and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. As well as his composing and teaching commitments, Thomas Hyde is chair of the Lucille Graham Trust, a member of the Little Missenden Festival committee and Presteigne Festival Advisory Group, and is also active as a writer on music. His study of David Matthews was published by Plumbago Books in 2014.